Lifeboat Foundation

Do we owe our existence to Jupiter? That used to be the standard paradigm in planetary theory, but now theorists routinely debate the merits of such a gas giant planet parked out at a 12 year orbit in our own solar system. However, one thing is clear; solar systems like ours with Jupiter analogs are pretty scarce.

Solar systems like ours, in which Jupiter-like planets orbit their parent stars at Jupiter-like distances, remain scarce in the local stellar neighborhood, says an Australian-led team of astronomers.

The team who report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal, analyzed the latest results from an ongoing planet detection survey of more than 200 solar-type stars mostly within some 300 light years of Earth.

Continue reading “Solar Systems Like Ours Remain Scarce” »

So, space fans, without further ado, here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover. I don’t usually host entire data sets (PDS-formatted and all) but I made an exception in this case because the Chinese website is a bit challenging to use.

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Nice! Robo-advice will be accessed by investors worth $2.2 trillion by 2020, equivalent to 12% of the global retail funds.

If you’re a finance professional, the question you probably get asked most by your friends and acquaintances is “what investments they should make”? That’s the basic question that everyone with money will ask. They may ask the “financial advisor” at their bank, they may turn to Google for advice, they may ask their “friends who work in finance”, or they may listen to recommendations of people they trust. However, individuals with a high net worth will typically seek out a wealth management firm with a brand they trust. But which firm?

Try to Google “top wealth management firms” and the first 5 search results will be a comparison of the top 100 wealth management firms. That’s a very competitive space. How do you differentiate yourself from your 99 competitors who are essentially trying to so the same thing you are? One way is through the use of technology, and as a result we see the rise of “robo advisors”. Here’s the definition of a “robo-advisor” from Investopedia:

Continue reading “The Real Truth Behind the Rise of Robo-Advisors” »

One of the best places to test what it will actually be like to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere is at 90,000 feet in our own. Ironically, this summer, Airbus and partners are testing the Perlan 2 glider in part to help determine among other things just what we need to do to actually aviate through the red planet’s atmosphere. Maybe Andy Weir has a sequel in him.

By pushing the atmospheric envelope at the edge of Earth’s stratosphere, the Airbus Perlan 2 glider’s next tests should pave the way for both future aviation on Mars and Earth-based commercial hypersonic aircraft, Allan McArtor, the Chairman and CEO of Airbus Group, Inc… told me.

The Perlan 2 sailplane/glider, which had its first test flight last September in Oregon, will attempt to reach its optimal cruising altitude of 90,000 feet as early as this coming June in Argentina, says McArtor. When it does, it will be the highest that any winged vehicle, powered or otherwise has gone.

Continue reading “Aviation on Mars? Airbus Perlan 2 Glider To Help Test Its Limits” »

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!”

Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur Clarke in interview at space.com, 2001.

Quotations collected by Sylvia Engdahl about why expansion into space is vital to the future survival of humankind, many of them from well-known people.

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The game of Go has long been viewed as the most challenging of classic games for artificial intelligence due to its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves.

Google DeepMind introduced a new approach to computer Go with their program, AlphaGo, that uses value networks to evaluate board positions and policy networks to select moves. These deep neural networks are trained by a novel combination of supervised learning from human expert games, and reinforcement learning from games of self-play. Without any lookahead search, the neural networks play Go at the level of state-of-the-art Monte-Carlo tree search programs that simulate thousands of random games of self-play. DeepMind also introduce a new search algorithm that combines Monte-Carlo simulation with value and policy networks. Using this search algorithm, our program AlphaGo achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away.

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Lonestar developed by Texas A&M is a possible tool that prospectors can utilize to locate mining opportunities on asteroids.

Astronauts fired this small, rectangular hunk from the International Space Station today. The payload will separate into two autonomous satellites as part of a research program to take us one tiny step closer towards making asteroid mining a reality.

If we ever want to mine asteroids, we’re going to need to step up our game for multiple satellites sharing data and working together. A pair of Texan universities are working together on a four-mission sequence to create a pair of robots that can autonomously rendezvous and dock in space. The project is called Low Earth Orbiting Navigation Experiment for Spacecraft Testing Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking — or Lonestar if you ignore the D.

Continue reading “This Two-in-One Satellite Will Bring Us One Step Closer to Asteroid Mining” »

Fractured space is the title of this article which highlights the drastic changes occurring in space. However, it does raise a question around “what could be the broader impacts resulting from future space colonization and mining operations on asteroids and planets/ moons?”

Pretty much the only time I compete online is in the world of MOBAs. Fractured Space has been going through a huge amount of changes, tweaks and updates but is heading firmly towards the ultimate goal of a final build. It’s a good start setting off in a sci-fi universe as pretty much every single MOBA worth playing is set in a fantasy world. There’s nothing wrong with orks and elves gameplay but giant capital ships blasting away at each other in deep space holds a greater appeal to me. First though, Fractured Space has a lovely new video to take a look at so sit back enjoy.

Continue reading “Preview: Fractured Space” »

Turns out water ice is quite abundant on the Plutonian surface:

New data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft point to more prevalent water ice on Pluto’s surface than previously thought.

This false-color image, derived from observations in infrared light by the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument, shows where the spectral features of water ice are abundant on Pluto’s surface. It is based on two LEISA scans of Pluto obtained on July 14, 2015, from a range of about 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers).

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